The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a piece that offers a beautiful and evocative snapshot of intellectual life at its best. Its authors, Khafiz Kerimov and Nicholas Bellinson of St. John’s College, describe students gathered around a blackboard in a campus coffee shop, each wielding a different color of chalk as they work through Euclid and Lobachevsky together. This is admirable, and more institutions could learn from St. John’s commitment to dialogue. But from this unique experience, the authors make a sweeping claim: that artificial intelligence - specifically tools like ChatGPT’s “study mode”- will steal our ability to think and work together. They worry that students will abandon collaborative learning for solitary interactions with machines, and that the vibrant hum of campus life will fade into silence. It’s a poetic warning. It’s also profoundly mistaken.
